Hall of Shame
The Hall of Shame is for people and employers who say or do retro, mistrustful, and anti-employee things related to remote employment. I believe the “problems” supposedly associated with remote employment, such as “overemployment” (working two full-time jobs), “quiet quitting,”’ and “lazy girl jobs” are evidence of leadership and systems failures, not inevitable problems of remote employment. In general, I’ve concluded in many situations, the advantages of remote employment outweigh solvable workplace management challenges.
Amazon
Amazon employees were stunned and horrified when CEO Andy Jassy mandated everyone to return to the office five days per week starting January 2, 2025. He said, “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup … you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems …” In June of 2025, Yahoo! reported that Amazon began forcing employees to relocate on short notice to employment hubs.
Blackstone
Stephen Schwarzman is the billionaire CEO of Blackstone, an investment and advisory firm. To CNN, he said, “People who worked remotely during the pandemic didn’t work as hard—regardless of what they told you.”
I’ll let Professor Kara Alaimo respond to this one. Dr. Alaimo is an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Dell
In a stunning reversal of their previous pro-WFH stance, Dell leadership announced that fully remote employees are no longer eligible for promotion. As reported by Ars Technica, Michael Dell had said previously, “If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you’re doing it wrong." UPDATE: It got worse in 2025.
Uhm, maybe Mr. Dell should have stuck with his original convictions.
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are bullies who promote authoritarian workplace practices. CNN reported them telling the Wall St. Journal, “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.”
Update in January 2025: Vivek Ramaswamy left DOGE. President Trump repeatedly waffles about whether Elon Musk is in charge of DOGE or not.
Flexport
The CEO and Founder of Flexport, Ryan Petersen, called remote work “white-collar fraud.” He reputedly fired anyone not willing to come back to the office. His explanation is that workers can’t be productive if they have children at home. His assertion makes no sense since Flexport’s revenue went from $670 million before the pandemic to $3.3 billion in 2021 during a time when many of his employees were remote. About the children topic, most reasonable people would agree remote employees need to pay for childcare so they can work without distraction, but pay them sufficient wages, and they can do that.
Reported by Times of India, Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google, said, “I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” and “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity.”
The SFGate wrote that Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt retracted this comment, “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning,” and he requested Stanford University remove the online video where he was shown saying it. They complied.
Grindr
CNN reported that Grindr lost almost half its staff after giving workers two weeks to choose between relocating to their respective team’s newly assigned “hub” city to work in-person twice a week or leave the company with severance.
JPMorgan
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is famously anti-remote work. His most well-known quote about it is, “And don't give me this shit that work-from-home-Friday works. I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there's not a goddamn person you can get a hold of." Author Minda Zetlin correctly explains that JPMorgan has management challenges of the “managing by line of sight” variety, and those problems won’t be fixed by firing all the remote employees as Dimon has suggested he plans to do.
Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., retired chairman and CEO of IBM Corp., current chairman of Gerstner Philanthropies
In the WSJ (requires a subscription), Gerstner said, “It is time to deflate the hot-air balloon known as remote work. We have lurched, in an almost lemming-like way, from a view that work is done five days a week in an office to the fantasy that it is perfectly acceptable to stay home two, three or even five days a week … The class of employees for whom working in a solitary setting is highly detrimental is people who aspire to lead or manage others in an academic, nonprofit, governmental or business institution. One learns how to manage and lead principally by watching others demonstrate how—or how not—to do so.”
Michael Bloomberg, CEO of Bloomberg
TheStreet reported that Bloomberg said he can’t work with anyone over Zoom, that remote workers are less productive than in-person workers because remote workers are out playing golf, and that remote work is “tragic.”
Somebody tell Bloomberg that people work productively over Zoom every day.
Nicolas Hieronimus, CEO of L’Oréal
TheStreet reported Hieronimus said he knows of remote workers who have “absolutely no attachment, no passion, no creativity.” He called in-office work “vital” and criticized remote work for its risk of being “damaging to mental health.”
I’m guessing Mr. Hieronimus is not an expert on mental health.
Paul Graham, Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist
Yahoo! Finance reported that Graham said that early positive feelings about remote work have faded. He said, “Why were all these smart people fooled? Partly I think because remote work does work initially, if you start with a system already healthy from in-person work … and partly because it seemed to solve recruiting, which is always a bottleneck.”
We weren’t fooled, Mr. Graham.
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix
Per Reworked.co, Hastings called remote employment a “pure negative.” He is famous for saying he expected Netflix employees to return to the office “12 hours after a (COVID-19) vaccine is approved.”
Sigh.
Sander van’t Noordende, CEO of Randstad
The CEO of Randstad told Fortune that “you have to be very special to be able to demand a 100% remote job,” meaning only elite performers with highly specialized skills will be able to work remotely.
If you learn of other people or employers who should be included here, please send them to me.
I started this Hall of Shame on 2024-05-05. I continually update it.
